If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know all about my love of food, especially my new-found love of Korean food. So imagine my excitement when I found, quite by accident, cooking classes for foreigners in Seoul. I immediately booked a class, excited not only for the experience, but also so that I could start to recreate my favourite meals at home. After all, I will at some point go back to England, and if I don’t know how to make Bibimbap by then it will be a disaster.

Hong Kong is for lovers. Food lovers, that is. So much so that on my most recent visit, I found myself gorging on local treats up to four times a day. Gluttonous? Sure. But, with the city's infinite number of street food vendors, bustling dim sum bruncheries, afternoon tea times and bakeries on just about every corner (oh, the bakeries!) it's almost impossible not to be constantly stuffing your face.

The fact is that there are few better ways to explore a country's culture than through its cuisine and this couldn't be truer in Hong Kong. So, in an effort to delve deeper into the culture and to pick up a few tips on how to bring local flavors back to Korea with me, I decided to enroll in a cooking class at Home's Cooking for the ultimate market-to-table experience.

Han. A simple word that has had many meanings over the years in the Land of the Morning Calm.

There's the Han River. The family surname. The shortened form of hana, one. Even Korea's name in Korean is Hanguk. And that famous Korean concept of powerful sadness, which has no literal translation in English and is a concept I won't even begin to try to explain, mostly because I have yet to understand myself.

Recently, when the Korean Wave phenomenon started to take off throughout Asia, the word han began to represent anything related to Korea. These days, when tourists travel to Korea, they often try to seek out as many han related activities as possible.